Tuesday 19th of March 2024

at the bottom end of the deep pool...

putin

Vladimir Putin and Sergei Lavrov discuss the Navalny case…


Putin: — So, why did we “poison” Navalny?
Lavrov: — We have too much kudos!… We needed brickbats from the West, and destroy our NordSea-2 gas supply to Germany…
P: — Makes sense.
L: — By doing it, it also helps our mate Mr America, you know, Donald…
P: — I can see that. What do we get in return?
L: — A ton of brickbats, hate mail and more Russophobia…
P: — Excellent…
L: — Not to mention that we've sent Navalny to Germany for treatment…
P: — So we mucked up the poisoning?
L: — Yes and no. We made sure the Hospital could find traces of something…
P: — Usual cockroach bait?
L: — same residue as Novichok…
P: — We’re in clover…
L: — Next time we cut him up in little bits…
P: — Like the Saudis did to Khashoggi?
L: — Or make him rot in a gulag, like Assange…
P: — This would be criminal, would it not?
L: — Sure, but fun...

the CIA probably did it...

Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne has joined several of her counterparts in condemning the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny and called on the Kremlin to perform a "thorough and transparent investigation". 

 

Key points:
  • The statement from world leaders says Mr Navalny's poisoning is "another grave blow against democracy" in Russia
  • The UN human rights chief this week said a pattern of poisonings of Russian citizens was "profoundly disturbing"
  • Medical officials in Germany say Mr Navalny may suffer long-term consequences from the severe poisoning

 

Australia, along with Germany, the US, UK, Italy, France, Japan and the European Union, said in a statement they were united in condemning the poisoning of Mr Navalny with the Soviet-era nerve agent Novichok, the use of which was confirmed by German medical experts. 

"Any use of chemical weapons, anywhere, anytime, by anybody, under any circumstances whatsoever, is unacceptable and contravenes the international norms prohibiting the use of such weapons," the statement said.

 

"Our heartfelt thoughts are with his family and we hope for his full and speedy recovery."

 

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-09-09/australia-condemns-poisoning-of-alexei-navalny-russia-opposition/12646564

 

 

--------------------

 

Okay, think about it... 

a most principled man...

People in the West are witnessing "increasing authoritarianism" and need more than ever to know what is being done by their governments and in their name, the director of the new documentary The War on Journalism: The Case of Julian Assange tells Sputnik.

Juan Passarelli, an award-winning filmmaker and journalist, co-founded Guerrilla Pictures and Infosec Bytes. He has worked with WikiLeaks for ten years and collaborated with them on multiple projects. Mr. Passarelli explains what let him to direct his latest film: The War on Journalism: The Case of Julian Assange and his dire predictions for the future of journalism if the WikiLeaks publisher is successfully extradited to the United States.

Sputnik: How did you come to work with WikiLeaks?

Juan Passarelli: I came to the UK to do a master's degree in TV journalism. And in that course, I had to do an internship and I decided to do the internship with the most interesting person I met in the course, which was Gavin MacFadyen at the Centre for Investigative Journalism.  I have never seen anything like it in the world and I hope to see something like that in the future, because it was a hub where new journalistic ventures were made and people were connected to other people and great stuff just came out of it.

Gavin was a good friend of Julian Assange. Also interning with me were Sarah Harrison and Joseph Farrell. I finished my internship and a few months later I saw them on TV. I messaged Sarah and they asked me to film for them, like a fly-on-the-wall-type documentary, for the release of the Iraq 'War Dogs'. That was October 2010 and ever since I've been filming them - for the last 10 years.

There's a lot of material and eventually I'll make a film out of that. That's how I met WikiLeaks, when I met Julian. I knew about WikiLeaks, but I didn't know about him. It struck me that he was a very intelligent man and something that I confirmed throughout the years is that he is not only a brilliant person and incredibly intelligent, who has basically created a world pre-WikiLeaks and post WikiLeaks. He is also one of the most courageous and principled men that I know... actually the most courageous and principled man.

And this is partly why he's in the place he is, because of his principles, because he stuck to his values.

Sputnik: Describe the premise of your new film The War on Journalism: The Case of Julian Assange.

Juan Passarelli: The premise of the film is simple. There is a war on journalism. There is an increasingly dangerous authoritarianism growing in the West, where people are being surveilled to a much greater extent than than the Germany Stazi ever was able to achieve, because of our digital spying apparatuses that we have in our pockets called smartphones.

And they have a lot of secrets that they don't want the public to know because if the public knows about them, they will lose the power they have. So the premise of the film is if you want the power to know and the ability to know what the government is doing in your name, you must support this case. You must support Julian Assange. And you must encourage people who have positions in technical [fields] - network managers and all these people that work in tech, that have access to a wide array of documentation, in whatever organisation they work in, to look at it and see if there's anything that they think the public should know. And, if they do, go to WikiLeaks.org with a Tor browser and anonymously and safely release that information and it will be published and made available to the public in the most responsible manner and in the way that gets the maximum attention possible.

Sputnik: Why did you make this film?

Juan Passarelli: Well, I've abstained [until now] from making a WikiLeaks film because I have not felt that this story had finished yet. I needed a clear ending and I have seen, throughout the years, a systematised campaign to attack Julian and WikiLeaks, with five different countries involved and their major, you know, propaganda apparatus, legal apparatus, trying to destroy him and WikiLeaks. The countries are the United States, Ecuador, Australia, Sweden, and the UK, of course.

I thought that it was time to do something because I've been witness to all of these events throughout the years. I've been witness to the publications and I've suffered with the people that had been investigating these materials when they discovered, you know, details like a girl being tortured with a drill or a group of coalition forces invading the house of a farmer, with his family and extended family there, they tied them up, they executed them, including several children, and then they ordered an air strike to eliminate the evidence of the absolute horror of murder. Obviously, there is [also] what we have seen so many times, and it's still grueling to my stomach, the collateral murder video that shows the callousness and detachment of the pilots towards human lives. And they seem like they're playing a game, a video game, and they're having fun while killing these people and saying stuff like, 'Yeah, look at these dead bastards. Nice'.

So I saw that and I saw how important these revelations were. I just wanted to make sure that I could put this in very simple terms. This is what he published. This is exactly why he's being charged and why the US wants to get him into the US and put him in a black dungeon where he could never be seen again.

Sputnik: Who is it that you’re trying to reach with this documentary?

Juan Passarelli: So this is a difficult question for me, because I was trying to reach people whose lives do not revolve around WikiLeaks. And that actually for me is kind of difficult because I've been so attached to this project for such a long time. Every time I talk to people that have normal jobs and lives, they have questions that just need answering, because there have been such incredible, systematic, attacks on him and on the organisation, and it just needs clarification.

Also it's been a case that's been going on for 10 years. So I think people might not even remember what 10 years looked like. So I was trying to remind people that this is not a difficult case to understand; that all the layers of propaganda and smears that have been laid upon it can be stripped bare really quickly to understand that what is at stake here is not only freedom of speech, but also their right to know what the government is doing in their name, with their taxes and with the mandate that they give them with the vote. If they are stripped of that right, there is no democracy. There is no way that they can make an informed decision as to who should be the leader of the country.

So that's the audience I'm trying to reach. I mean, as far and as wide an audience as possible, and people who might care about their right to know.

Sputnik: What do you say to those who argue that Julian Assange should face trial in the United States and that if he is innocent, he has nothing to fear?

Juan Passarelli: Well, the Espionage Act has never been used on a journalist, ever. So this is already a very worrying thing. And the precedent that some people say will be set if he is extradited in my mind has already been set. Because if journalists receive information that is of the calibre of the information that WikiLeaks published in 2010, I would think that they might actually self-censor and not publish everything, or have to protect themselves and limit the amount of information that the public receives.

In some way we saw this happening in the Panama papers. We're seeing all these attacks on journalists in Australia and Brazil with Glenn Greenwald, in the United States where journalists are getting beaten up and putting in prison. I think that in the Courts of Eastern Virginia, where he would be tried, where 80% of the population is made up of people that work for the CIA, the NSA, the Defence Department of Defense or Homeland Security, or their family members or security contractors, he doesn't stand a chance, just in [terms of] the jury.

Also, the CIA has been spying on his privileged legal conversations with his lawyers over the United States case. I mean, this is outrageous, the case should be thrown out just on those grounds.

How is it that he can possibly have a fair trial in the US if the United States has been spying on his legal conversations, you know, he cannot have a fair trial in the US.

And there is no reason why he should ever - setting apart all these illegalities - there is no reason why a journalist should go to another country where he could be prosecuted for espionage, when he didn't publish that information there to begin with. 

What is happening here is that the US is outreaching its jurisdiction and literally taking over the sovereignty of the United Kingdom and applying its laws in the sovereign nation of the UK, in the Queen's land, shall we say, and using their laws to try to extradite him to the country where he would face a proceeding in secret - where his lawyers [may] not be able to talk about the case - and where... he's facing 175 years in prison. This is absolutely insane.

 

 

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/analysis/202009021080337386-latest-assange-documentary-is-about-the-most-courageous-and-principled-man-i-know-director-says/

 

The attempt on the life of Navalny is a sorry affair, and like the Skripals before him this "murder" seems to have been "botched". If I was Putin I would sack all the GRU from top to bottom and replace these useless agents by kids with lollipops. But if one analyses both cases, the timing, the circumstances and the "botched" effect — plus a lot of whys and therefores — leads to the simple conclusion that the Kremlin did not do any of these poisoning. Meanwhile as the US are pursuing Assange in the most disgusting way, we can only suspect that the CIA or one of the US agencies would "poison" Navalny (without killing him — we don't want the full murder on our conscience, do we?) in order to yet tarnish Putin in the eyes of the West, especially the Germans who are after some gas... In the days when Belarus is about to become the 53rd state of Yamerika, we cannot let the bloody bone fall from our jaws... 

 

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it won't happen again if the CIA does not do it...

The US secretary of state Mike Pompeo has said there was a “substantial chance” the poisoning of Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny was ordered by senior Russian officials.

“I think people all around the world see this kind of activity for what it is,” Pompeo said in a radio interview with conservative host Ben Shapiro. “And when they see the effort to poison a dissident, and they recognise that there is a substantial chance that this actually came from senior Russian officials, I think this is not good for the Russian people.”

Pompeo reiterated that the United States and its European allies all wanted Russia to “hold those responsible for this accountable” and said Washington would also try to identify the perpetrators.

“It’s something that we’ll take a look at, we’ll evaluate, and we’ll make sure we do our part to do whatever we can to reduce the risk that things like this happen again.”

 

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/sep/10/pompeo-substantial-chance-senior-russian-officials-behind-alexei-navalny-poisoning

 

 

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I have substantial evidence that the ants on planet Mars are preparing to invade the Earth...

a russian communiqué...

In connection with the demarche undertaken by the Group of Seven on the ‘Alexei Navalny case’, the Foreign Ministry has issued the following statement. Russia insists that Germany provide data on Alexei Navalny’s medical examination, including the results of the biochemical tests, as per the official request for legal assistance submitted by the Office of the Prosecutor General of the Russian Federation on August 27, 2020. Berlin has not been willing to respond to our repeated requests in a prompt and constructive manner.

Without the above-mentioned information, the Russian law enforcement agencies are unable to engage all the necessary procedural mechanisms in order to establish the circumstances of the incident. Meanwhile, the frenzy that is being stirred up around this case is only growing.

We note that Russian doctors proposed establishing close dialogue with their German colleagues in order to discuss the available data on Alexei Navalny’s health that is held in Russia and in Germany. Unfortunately, the German side has been thwarting this process.

The unconstructive approach by the German authorities is accompanied by groundless accusations against Russia. The massive misinformation campaign that has been unleashed clearly demonstrates that the primary objective pursued by its masterminds is to mobilise support for sanctions, rather than to care for Alexei Navalny’s health or establish the true reasons for his admission to hospital.

 

 

Read more:

https://www.voltairenet.org/article210777.html

 

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Why would the Russians allow Navalny to go to a German hospital, for them to be hit for six? Are the Russians dumb? NOooooo! They did it to gauge how much the West would go and lie about Russia — and to source the real culprits of the stint. The Ruskies would know who by now who did it — and will wait till after the presidential elections, I guess, to press a few sore points on the US gonads... Things are never what they seem...

no investigation...

Alexei Navalny: Russia denies 'promising' investigation

Italian PM Giuseppe Conte has said the world "awaits an explanation" from Russia over the alleged poisoning of Alexei Navalny. Berlin police have reportedly boosted protection at the hospital where he is recovering.

A spokesman for Russian President Vladimir Putin denied reports Thursday that the Kremlin will set up an inquiry into the alleged poisoning of Alexei Navalny.

Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte told an Italian newspaper earlier on Thursday that Russian President Vladimir Putin had promised to set up an inquiry into the recent poisoning of his critic Alexei Navalny.

"President Putin has assured me that Russia intends to clear up what has happened, and told me that he would set up a committee of inquiry and was ready to collaborate with the German authorities," Conte told Il Foglio.

However, a Kremlin spokesman told reporters in Moscow there must have been a "misunderstanding."

Navalny is currently recovering in a Berlin hospital from poisoning by a Novichok nerve agent. He wastaken out of a medically-induced coma earlier in the week.

Russian authorities have demanded that Berlin hand over evidence of the alleged Novichok poisoning, with which they deny any involvement.

The UN and NATO have urged Russia to launch or cooperate in an inquiry.

Read more: Russia hits out at 'hysteria' over Navalny poisoning

 

 

Read more:

https://www.dw.com/en/alexei-navalny-russia-denies-promising-investigation/a-54875959

 

Please, read from top. Gus things that there are 99% chances that it was a false flag event set up by the Americans to prevent the NordSea2 project going ahead... This isn't far fetched. By now the Russians would know who did it, but, like the English kept their code breaking of the Enigma machine secret, to the cost of many lives, in order to win the war, the Russians would follow the powder trail to the originators of the stint, without saying a word. 

he must have read gus leonisky's blog...

A French pundit has questioned the Western narrative that Moscow played a role in the alleged poisoning of Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny. Yet, the ‘deviation’ did not go down well with some of the French establishment.

German military scientists claim that Navalny, a prominent activist in Russia, was poisoned by a potent military-grade nerve agent last month. Berlin said that it had “a lot of evidence” that the Russian state was involved but has so far failed to provide this evidence to Moscow. Nevertheless, German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas has threatened Russia with sanctions over the alleged attack, while his G7 colleagues have condemned the “confirmed poisoning” in the “strongest terms.”


However, prominent French essayist Eric Zemmour sees things differently. Though Western media are coalescing around the idea that Navalny was poisoned by the Russian state, Zemmour departed from that narrative in dramatic style.

“I’m trying to understand, and there are things that confuse me,” he told France's Cnews channel on Wednesday night. “If Putin gave the order to poison this political opponent, then why did Russian doctors save his life and transport him to Germany for treatment by the Germans, at the risk of exposing the crime? This is strange.”

Zemmour even hinted that the US Central Intelligence Agency may have had a hand in the case.

Some people fantasize about the KGB, which has become the FSB, I fantasize about the CIA, which is still the CIA.

The CIA certainly has a long and storied history of assassination attempts on its enemies, and carried out botched poisonings on Cuban leader Fidel Castro and Congolese nationalist Patrice Lumumba during the Cold War. Though there is no evidence to suggest it is, Zemmour reckons the agency could be up to its old tricks again.

“This story took place at a time when the Americans are putting pressure on the Germans to give up Nord Stream 2,” he remarked, referring to a natural gas pipeline that will supply Germany with cheap Russian gas once operational. 

The US is opposing the $10 billion project, while trying to boost its own liquefied natural gas shipments to Europe. However, the higher transit costs of the American gas have thus far proven a sticking point for Germany and other EU nations.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel initially said that Navalny’s case would not deter her from pressing ahead with Nord Stream 2, yet the sentiment in Berlin appears to be changing. After dozens of EU MEPs circulated a letter calling for a halt to the project, Maas said this week that he hopes “the Russians don’t force us to change our stance on Nord Stream 2.” Despite this statement, Maas admitted that he has not yet passed the information relevant to the case to Moscow.

While being rather vague on Washington's potential - and not proven - involvement in Navalny saga, Zemmour appeared to be rather sure on US role in the current unrest in Belarus. Opposition leaders there say President Alexander Lukashenko’s recent re-election was fraudulent.

"As for Belarus, I can clearly see the CIA behind what is happening, because this is what they have been doing for ten years,” Zemmour said. “Whenever there is an 'Orange Revolution', Americans, Soros NGOs and American special services are behind it as if by accident.”

Lukashenko himself would certainly agree, and has accused Washington and its allies of attempting to kickstart a Ukraine-style “color revolution” to oust him from power. France’s establishment, on the other hand, was mortified by Zemmour’s claims.

“I thought I was on Russia Today,” Nathalie Loiseau, an MEP from French President Emmanuel Macron’s party, exclaimed, shocked that opinions like Zemmour’s could be expressed on French television. In deviating from the establishment narrative, Loiseau accused Zemmour of speaking for “the Russian far-right.”

French parliamentarian Frederic Petit said that he was “flabbergasted to hear Eric Zemmour on a French channel pouring the same propaganda (conspiracy) served by the Lukashenko regime and Russia.”

 


Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/500384-cia-poisoned-navalny-french/

 

 

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it could have been...

The attempt on Navalny's life could have been done by OTHER opposition parties or even Chechen rebels to embarrass Putin, but it is most likely that a chain of command came from the US "intelligence" agencies...

 

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next, fiddles with the US elections...

elections

Voters across Russia are casting their ballots in dozens of local elections that are seen as a big test for the ruling pro-Kremlin United Russia party.Nearly 160,000 candidates are vying for seats in local parliaments. Governors are also being elected in many regions.The polls come only weeks after the suspected poisoning of opposition leader Alexei Navalny with Novichok. His team allege this was done on the orders of President Vladimir Putin - the Kremlin denies any involvement.

Read more:https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-54135141

Read from top.
Please see that the sarcasm-infused cartoons are the normal pisstake on the US deep state's influence on the world...

slowly but surely...

When asked by RT, German government representatives failed to explain the mystery surrounding Alexey Navalny's associate M. Pevchikh, who was with him at the time of the alleged poisoning and fled for Germany shortly.

German government spokespeople were grilled by RT Deutsch during a press conference on Monday. The officials, however, failed to provide any actual answer about the woman identified by Russian authorities as Marina Pevchikh.

“I can’t tell you anything about this. We must not forget that an attempt was made on the life of Mr. Navalny with the use of a poisonous substance. But I can’t tell you anything about the location of an individual,” Steffen Seibert stated.

The associate of the Kremlin critic was reportedly together with Navalny in Tomsk before his alleged poisoning. Unlike all other individuals who interacted with him on that day, she did not cooperate with Russian investigators and fled the country to Germany.

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/news/500685-navalny-associate-pevchikh-germany/

 

 

At this level of deceit, it is most likely that Marina Pevchikh is involved in the "poisoning". Second, by the time analysis have been done by 3 (three) European labs, the original "poison" would have disappeared and any old cockroach bait could give the same result in identification of "effects". So, who is Marina Pevchikh? Why did not she cooperate in Russia and how did her name cropped up with RT media (and no one else so far)?

 

We have to guess that the "poisoning" was done just prior to the council elections in Russia — and blaming Putin would reduce his hold in the mind of some people. Either way, the whole thing stinks even more of Russophobia false flag event than the Kremlin paying attention to Mr 2 per cent with no representation in parliament. I don't know much about Russian psychology, but I know this much: the Ruskies are not as dumb as 99 per cent of the Western media and their political masters...

 

 

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investments, not political deals...

Amid tensions between European countries and Russia over the Navalny affair, the operator of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline told Sputnik the project was built around investments, not political deals.

 

The case of Russian opponent Alexei Navalny has rekindled tensions between Russia and European countries, some of which are in favor of new sanctions against Moscow, including a suspension of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project.


"The Nord Stream 2 company is not based on political agreements between countries but on investments of billions of dollars of six energy giants, five of which represent members of the European Union," the operator of the eponymous gas pipeline told Sputnik. in construction.

He recalled in this context that the project was implemented in full compliance with the international and national law of each country and that it had received all the necessary approvals from the government agencies of the five countries.


Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen had previously called for further discussions on the construction of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline in the context of the Navalny affair, Danish public broadcaster DR reported. The Danish Energy Agency gave the green light to the construction of the pipeline in July 2019.


On September 14, the regulator told Sputnik that there was no question of revoking the license for Nord Stream 2 for political reasons and that its task was only to make sure that the companies met the appropriate conditions.


The Navalny file


The project found itself at the center of controversy following the Alexei Navalny affair, who, suffering from illness on board a plane, was hospitalized first in Russia and then transferred to Germany. Berlin says the Russian opponent, whose health has since improved, was poisoned by a Novichok-type nerve agent and some countries say they are considering introducing sanctions against Moscow.


Nord Stream 2 associates the Russian giant Gazprom with five European groups: the French Engie, the Germans Uniper and Wintershall, the Austrian OMV and the Anglo-Dutch Shell, for a total budget estimated at 9.5 billion euros. The project is over 90% complete.

 

Read more:

https://fr.sputniknews.com/international/202009141044431041-quel-lien-entre-nord-stream-2-et-laffaire-navalny-loperateur-du-gazoduc-sexprime/

 

 

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from james o'neill...

 

Few stories in recent years more clearly illustrate the sorry decline in western media standards than the coverage currently being given to the illness of Russian dissident politician Alexei Navalny.

Mr Navalny is at most a minor irritant to the ruling Russian politicians. At the last election he polled less than 2% of the popular vote. In most western countries such a poll rating would barely receive a mention, being classified along with the usual vast array of single-issue fanatics, religious cranks, and those enjoying a brief moment in the spotlight. Certainly, a party that barely registers on the electoral landscape would not receive the extensive coverage given to Mr Navalny.

Publicising his many adventures and misadventures clearly therefore serves a wider political purpose, in this case giving rise to the propaganda theme that Vladimir Putin faces serious opposition. A related theme is that if the said Western favourite does not actually ever win even a significant share of the vote, let alone actual political power, it must be because of some political skulduggery.

Over his career, Mr Navalny has been physically attacked on more than one occasion, and similarly imprisoned on more than one occasion for his constant breaches of the electoral laws, or laws governing the making of political protests. His arrest of course does nothing to diminish his cry of being persecuted, or a threat to the establishment and similar claims that are marked by a complete absence of realism.

None of which serves to lower him in the eyes of the western mainstream media. The latest incident involving Mr Navalny, who was taken ill on a flight to Moscow has given rise to a flurry of anti-Russian propaganda in the western media, and attacks on Mr Putin in particular.

Lost in the flurry of rhetoric of wild allegations is anything regarding a logical analysis of the sequence of events. Mr Navalny, we are told, became ill on a flight having drunk a cup of tea. Assuming for the moment this is correct, was the tea consumed prior to or during the flight? That question is vaguely unanswered. If it was before the flight, what steps were taken to investigate the person(s) who made the tea or delivered it to him? Again, there is a complete blank.

Mr Navalny became sufficiently ill on the flight, which overwhelmingly suggests he received the substance (if indeed there was one) on board. Again, from whom and under what circumstances remains unanswered. The Novichok now alleged to be at fault is a rapidly acting and almost invariably fatal substance, yet he survived. Reports suggest that he was loudly screaming, not a reaction commonly associated with taking a potentially fatal dose of a deadly substance.

The plane diverted from its route and made an emergency landing whereupon Mr Navalny was rushed to hospital where strenuous efforts were made to save his life. None of this is consistent with a State sponsored assassination attempt.

The Russian hospital made strenuous efforts to save his life. As part of the treatment they took blood samples, the testing of which revealed no evidence of a Novichok type poisoning. The hospital retains those blood samples, which are crucial to any understanding of this series of events.

Mr Navalny was then flown to a Berlin hospital. Again, there are several curiosities. He was flown in a non-commercial flight apparently paid for by a hitherto unknown organisation. The cost would have been substantial, but we do not know by whom it was paid.

If Mr Navalny had in fact been poisoned with a Novichok like substance it completely defies logic that he would have been allowed to fly to a western hospital where such a poisoning would have been readily ascertainable.

The Berlin hospital has now announced that they detected a Novichok like substance (the details of which are rather vague), in Mr Navalny. There are a number of logical possibilities in response to this announcement.

The first is that the Russian medical team were incredibly incompetent and did not discover the cause of their patient’s illness. This seems highly improbable. Secondly, Mr Navalny was administered the substance on the plane en route to Berlin (a five-hour journey) or after he arrived in Berlin. If one accepts that the Russian hospital specialists were competent, then during the flight or after arrival must have been when the substance was administered. This option assumes that there was in fact such a substance detected in Mr Navalny, a far from certain assumption.

This raises the question of a wider motive for the possible attack on Mr Navalny, and more importantly the propaganda used to which the incident has been put. This brings us closer to what is likely the real motive for the hysteria being generated against Russia as being responsible for Mr Navalny’s illness.

The Nord Stream 2 project is nearing completion requiring only a few weeks before Russian oil and gas is pumped to Germany. It is no secret that this project has been bitterly opposed by the Americans, who have bullied, cajoled, threatened and bribed the Germans and the Danes (through whose waters the pipeline passes) in an endeavour to cancel the project.

To everyone’s complete absence of surprise the Americans want to supply their fuel instead to Germany. The fact that the cost of the American alternative is about 40% greater than the Russian product is a powerful reason for the Germans (and other European markets) to prefer the Russian option. There is also a political incentive not to be dependent on American suppliers. The price would almost certainly increase if the United States became Europe’s supplier, to the immense competitive disadvantage of European users.

At the time of writing the Russian agreement with Germany hangs in the balance. German Chancellor Angela Merkel, previously impervious to United States bullying and threats, now seems equivocal about the Russian contract. A German cancellation of the contract would be a major victory for Donald Trump and some consolation to him for the thwarting of the attempted coup in Belarus.

That a cancellation of the contract will impose huge cost on the Europeans is the least of Trump’s worries. The economic cost will be only part of the burden for the Europeans. They will have demonstrated yet again that their independence is a shame. The cost for Russia will also be substantial although they have been developing alternatives to the East as part of a wider realignment of economic and political ties.

Perhaps the major lesson to be drawn from this whole sorry saga is that Russia must redouble its efforts to create alternatives to the European market. Mr Navalny is an illustration of how expedient individuals can be when they get caught in the much wider geopolitical game being played by the Americans.

James O’Neill, an Australian-based Barrister at Law, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”.

 

 

Read more:

https://journal-neo.org/2020/09/15/navalny-sacrificed-as-part-of-a-wider-geopolitical-battle/

 

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no link...

Against certain views in Europe — and despite pressure from Washington — Austrian President Alexander Van der Bellen has categorically refused to link the fate of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline project to the Navalny affair.

 

Austrian president Alexander Van der Bellen made this very clear on September 15 when he said he saw no connection between the two during an interview with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky in Vienna, as reported by the Tass agency.

 

Find out more about RT France: https://francais.rt.com/international/78819-aucun-lien-autriche-refuse-r...

 

 

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the old water bottle trick...

Apparently, we are told without a flicker of doubt, that Navalny's water bottle(s) at his hotel had traces of Novichok on the plastic. We are now convinced that he has been poisoned with Novichok and that he was lucky that he did not die from the caper, which kills in minutes, while it was quite a few hours later that he fell ill. We wish him a good recovery like that of the Skripals whom we have not seen live for about a year and a half, but are told some new snippets by MI6 via the media about some door knobs. In all the pictures regarding Navalny, we haven't seen the usual gross yellow protection suits that are the trademark of Novichok investigations... Investigating slackos indeed. 

 

 

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the NYT asks why. the answer is the CIA would...

Opinion


Vladimir Putin Thinks He Can Get Away With Anything


Why has the poisoning of Alexei Navalny been met with Western silence?



By The Editorial Board


The editorial board is a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values. It is separate from the newsroom.


It is now an established fact, confirmed by laboratories in Germany, France and Sweden, that Alexei Navalny was poisoned with Novichok, a nerve agent developed by the Soviet Union. The powerful poison, which has been used in at least one previous assassination attempt against foes of the Russian regime, was this time employed against a domestic opposition leader who operated openly to expose corruption and challenge the Kremlin. It requires a serious response.


In the face of Kremlin stonewalling, many questions remain unanswered and are likely to remain so. Chief among them is whether President Vladimir Putin ordered or approved the attempted assassination. Then there is the fact that once again, the victim survived the attack, and the nerve agent was identified. Mr. Navalny had been flying home from Siberia to Moscow when he was stricken. Did his poisoners want him to perish on the way, as the timetable of the attack suggests, and want to cover up the reason? Or was it their intention to convey a brutal warning of what happens to those who challenge the Kremlin?


Mr. Navalny may have survived largely because of the pilot’s alacrity in landing and getting him to a hospital. The government later allowed him to be taken to Germany for further treatment. Once they heard of his collapse, Mr. Navalny’s colleagues quickly collected what they could from his last hotel in Siberia and got the evidence to Germany, where traces of Novichok were found on a water bottle.


Whatever the full story, the Russian government’s contemptible posturing as an aggrieved victim of unfair suspicions only intensify the need to demand a reckoning from the Kremlin. Mr. Putin knows what happened, or he can find out, and if he continues to hide behind glaringly phony denials and ridiculous accusations, he only strengthens the suspicion that this was a deliberate, state-sanctioned hit. He had the greatest motive, means and opportunity.

Even if it was an operation ordered at some lower level, the attack on Mr. Navalny breaks new ground. Ranking assassinations according to degrees of infamy may seem frivolous, and attacking two former Russian double agents residing in England, Sergei Skripal and Alexander Litvinenko, by nerve gas or radiation, is hard to exceed in brazenness.


But Mr. Navalny was not a former spy. He was by far the best known and most visible of Mr. Putin’s political opponents. His exposés of official corruption — most famously of the extravagant properties owned by the former president Dmitri Medvedev — were widely circulated, detailed and credible. Those who tried to kill him had to know, and not care, that the attack could be seen only as an attempt to silence a strong and effective political voice.

 

Read more:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/22/opinion/vladimir-putin-navalny-poisoning.html

 

 

Please oh please, read from top... Putin HAD NOTHING TO GAIN by poisoning Navalny. NOTHING. Read from top. That someone else did if to embarrass Putin is 99 % more likely... Ergo sum, say the CIA or one of its front shops, in various countries including RUSSIA... The NYT editorial board is a bore...

 

 

 

a couple of false flag events

 

By Max Parry

 

On August 20th, Russian opposition figure and self-styled “anti-corruption” activist Alexei Navalny fell seriously ill while in mid-flight from Tomsk, Siberia to the Russian capital. The Moscow-bound plane was abruptly re-routed to make an emergency landing in the Siberian city of Omsk where the anti-Kremlin politician was subsequently hospitalized for suspected poisoning and placed in a medically-induced coma.

Two days later, Navalny was airlifted to Germany in an evacuation arranged by a Berlin-based “human rights” NGO at the request of Pussy Riot spokesman Pyotr Verzilov. His transport on a medically-equipped plane with German specialists was permitted by the Russian authorities who now stand accused of culpability in the alleged attack, all in the midst of the ongoing pandemic.

While the Russian doctors in Omsk (who saved Navalny’s life) maintain they did not find any evidence of chemical weapons substances in his system, upon examination the German government quickly announced that its military lab had discovered “unequivocal evidence” Navalny was poisoned by a Soviet-era Novichok nerve agent and demanded an explanation from the Kremlin — without providing any of said evidence to Moscow or the public, of course. 

Despite being the supposed victim of an extremely deadly military-grade nerve agent, three weeks later Navalny came out his comatose state and off ventilation, defiantly vowing a return to Russia. Was he ever tested for COVID-19? At this point it seems more likely than this propaganda stunt we are expected to believe.

It is unconvincing precisely because it follows a pattern of improbable events questionably attributed to the Kremlin. As many have noted, the incident strikingly resembles the alleged March 2018 poisoning in Salisbury, England of disgraced former Russian intelligence officer Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, visiting from Moscow which caused a similar diplomatic row.

Skripal, who had been a double agent for MI6 and served ten years imprisonment for high treason, was exiled to the UK after his sentence in a spy-swap between Russia and Britain in 2010. While residing in southern England, Skripal was reportedly in close contact with a security consultant who worked for the author of the salacious but fabricated dossier on US President Donald Trump’s alleged ties to Russia, former British intelligence agent Christopher Steele — and may have even been the source of its unverified contents.

Skripal and his daughter were discovered unconscious on a park bench, but were said to have been initially contaminated hours earlier by the extremely fast-acting substance applied to the door handle of his residence. Similarly, Alexei Navalny is said to have been contaminated by a water bottle in his hotel room, not in the tea he drank at the Tomsk Bogashevo airport cafe before boarding his flight as originally believed. 

How is the elapsed time in both of these cases possible?

The toxin, in Navalny’s case, was also not discovered until examination in Germany, meaning a bottle laced with a chemical warfare agent was transported all the way to Berlin? 

None of those who came to Navalny’s aid or treated him suffered any noxious effects, unlike the Skripals where multiple police officers at least showed minor symptoms. Still, both Navalny and the Skripals fully recovered from their supposed exposure to an extremely lethal toxin considered even more deadly than sarin or VX gas. 

After their release from the hospital, the Skripals immediately went into hiding which has left the enormous questions surrounding the incident still unresolved two years later. However, the damage was already done as the UK government immediately blamed Moscow and more than 100 Russian diplomats were expelled by Britain and its Western allies.

Months later in June 2018, two British nationals were the victims of an accidental poisoning (one fatally) after they discovered a discarded but unopened perfume bottle containing the same poisonous agent. Then that September, Scotland Yard released CCTV footage of two Russian men alleged to be GRU military intelligence agents in Salisbury at the time of the attack.

However, no verifiable evidence was ever provided by the British government showing that the two were responsible, though it was conveniently claimed that the would-be culprits clumsily left vestiges of the fatal chemical agent in their hotel room.

So, not only is Russian intelligence incapable of carrying out successful assassinations, but carelessly unable to cover their tracks? The premise was already absurd enough but made even more fanciful by Britain’s refusal to comply with the Chemical Weapons Convention in providing Moscow with requested samples of the toxin which purportedly poisoned the treasonous ex-spook and his daughter. Thus far in the Navalny case, Germany is following the same script.

What a coincidence that the attack comes just as Nord Stream 2, the second line of the massive natural gas pipeline under construction from Russia to Germany opposed by the US and several NATO allies, is near completion. 

Suddenly, the diplomatic fall-out has put the controversial project in limbo, with Chancellor Angela Merkel and the German government under pressure from Washington to withdraw from the project which would increase Russian influence on Europe’s energy infrastructure and rival the US’s costlier exports.

As pointed out by Die Linke’s Dietmar Bartsch, where were the calls to halt the purchase of Saudi oil imports after the grisly murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi? It is clear that the Anglo-Americans are simply desperate to halt the resurgence of Moscow on the international stage, threatening their German counterparts with sanctions as the final sections of the pipeline conveying Russian gas across the Baltic Sea is being constructed. 

The attack on Navalny could not occur at a more auspicious time for the Atlanticists and a worse time for Moscow.

The notion that Russian President Vladimir Putin would try to assassinate an opposition figure who holds a minuscule 2% support amongst the population, far behind other opponents nonexistent to Western media, but the one who just so happens to be favored by Washington, is contrary to any reason or common sense. 

Not to mention, at the exact moment it would jeopardize a project essential to Russia’s economic growth and frugality, as the pipeline would link Moscow with Western Europe bypassing neighboring transit countries such as the Ukraine (also opposed to Nord Stream 2) which have costly transit fees. 

Is it really the Russian government who stands to massively benefit from this fiasco? 

The answer to “cui bono?” could not be more clear: US, Saudi and Emirati oil and gas interests, not the Kremlin. Russia was also recently the first nation to develop a COVID-19 vaccine candidate with its Sputnik V registered in August, an international competition that has been heavily politicized by Washington which is eager to cast aspersions on Moscow’s accomplishment. 

Meanwhile, Germany is also the one Western European country where Washington’s anti-Russian propaganda is falling flat, as recent polls consistently show that the vast majority of Germans don’t see Russia as a threat, likely a result of their high rate of media literacy.

Despite Navalny’s recovery, there are already calls to legislate a ‘Navalny Act’ as a follow-up to the Magnitsky Act, a bipartisan bill previously passed by the US House of Representatives in 2012 under the Obama Administration. The Magnitsky act sanctioned Russian officials accused of being responsible for the 2009 death of Sergei Magnitsky, an unscrupulous Russian tax lawyer who helped dodgy international financiers like the US-born British tycoon William Browder commit massive tax evasion in Russia. 

Magnitsky died under mysterious circumstances while in custody awaiting trial for facilitating Browder’s skullduggery and suffering from poor health, with the Russian prison officials first accused of depriving him of medical treatment and then allegedly beating and torturing him to death.

The fascinating 2016 documentary The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes explores the case from the perspective of Westernized Putin critic and filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov, who through the course of his investigation unexpectedly discovers that the mainstream media narrative of Magnitsky’s death was a fiction concocted by Browder. Suddenly, Nekrasov’s entire perspective on Russia comes into question and the film takes on a metanarrative of the nature of propaganda itself.

What we are being told about Navalny is likely another fairy tale like the implausible story forged by Mr. Browder about the death of the auditor he hired to enrich himself exploiting Russia’s tax loopholes. Incredibly, the American-born investor is the grandson of Earl Browder, the leader of the Communist Party USA during its heyday until his expulsion at the end of World War II. 

When the wartime US-Soviet alliance fell apart and the Cold War began, the elder Browder proved more loyal to American imperialism than the communist movement and presided over the liquidation of the CPUSA until it was reestablished with his dismissal as General Secretary. Having grown up in a Russian-speaking family, decades later his grandson decided to cash in on the collapse of the former Soviet Union through various investment ventures as manager of the hedge fund Hermitage Capital Management. 

When Putin succeeded Boris Yeltsin and numerous oligarchs went into exile or landed themselves in prison, Bill Browder was forced to flee the country after defrauding the Russian government of millions with the help of the late Mr Magnitsky.

One of those banished oligarchs, billionaire media tycoon Boris Berezovsky, also died under dubious circumstances in the UK when he was found hanging in his apartment bathroom in Berkshire, England in 2013. Like Magnitsky, Putin and the Russian government were suspected of involvement in Berezovsky’s death by the media without a shred of evidence, even though his suspicious purported “suicide” actually came shortly after expressing a written willingness to return to Russia and reconcile with Putin — which almost certainly would have been a stroke of good luck for Russian counter-intelligence and a threat to the West, not the Kremlin. 

Berezovsky had been close with a former agent of the Federal Security Service (FSB, the KGB’s successor), Alexander Litvinenko, a defector renowned for claiming he had been ordered by Putin to assassinate Berezovsky and subsequently lived in the UK as a consultant for British intelligence until his own polonium poisoning in 2006, the first of a series of episodes framing Moscow. Consistently, however, in every one of these cases it is never the Kremlin which stands to gain.

There is a reason Putin consistently polls over 70% in favorability with the Russian people and that is his directing the country away from Western domination under the ruinous neoliberal economic policies of his corrupt and inebriated predecessor Boris Yeltsin. Yeltsin’s administration auctioned off the former state-owned assets to foreign investors such as Browder and oligarchs like Berezovsky. 

Meanwhile, Navalny has a level of support well under 5%, with recent polls placing him behind the Communist Party’s Pavel Grudinin and the ultra-nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky. While Navalny’s own rhetoric has shifted over the years, he has controversially maintained his own cozy relationship with ethnic nationalists who make up a significant amount of his right-wing populist base, even co-organizing annual marches dominated by racist skinheads.

Navalny infamously coined the slogan “Stop Feeding the Caucasus!” advocated by xenophobic nationalists calling for the defunding and secession of the Muslim-majority North Caucasus from Russia, while making frequent Islamophobic statements and stoking anti-immigrant sentiments against Central Asians. 

You would never know this reading Western media who have completely sanitized Navalny’s politics (if they ever address them at all), while they remain obsessed with the perceived ingratiation between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin even though the former’s politics have far more in common with Navalny than the Russian President. Given the US support for far right nationalists in the 2014 anti-Russian coup d’etat in Ukraine, Washington has no qualms about backing fascists to undermine Moscow.

In 1831, Russia’s most famous and revered poet, Alexander Pushkin, composed To the Slanderers of Russia, a patriotic ode in response to members of the French parliament who were advocating for a military intervention to assist the Polish uprising against the Russian Empire. Pushkin asserted that the Polish uprising was an inter-slavic “ancient, domestic dispute”, while the Poles considered it an issue of national independence which their European allies were eager to exploit against Moscow. 

For the great Russian writer, the Polish alliance with the tyrant and invader Napoleon was unforgivable. He also reportedly communicated to General Alexander von Benckendorff, the chief of the Tsarist secret police assigned to censor and surveil him, that the Europeans were still bitter over the failed French invasion of Russia in 1812 and had not yet attacked with weapons but were doing so with “daily mad slander.”

Fast forward nearly 200 years later and little has changed in Russia-West relations.

The only thing that has arguably transformed is Russia’s standing on the world stage following the collapse of the Russian Empire in 1917 and the Soviet Union almost 75 years later, the latter of which was masterminded by a Polish-born National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, whose Russophobic worldview was a product of the deep-seated “ancient, domestic dispute” Pushkin wrote of a century earlier. 

Contrary to the Western portrayal of the resurgence of Moscow in the new millennia under Vladimir Putin as neo-tsarist expansionism, post-Soviet Russia is actually a relatively weak capitalist state that has found itself a target of regime change by the West which seeks the colonization and balkanization of Eastern Europe.

The US invasion of Iraq in 2003 caused a spike in oil prices that generated huge profits for Chevron and ExxonMobil, but also had the unintended consequence of benefiting Russia’s state-run oil industry just as Putin was re-nationalizing its energy assets and banishing financial criminals like Browder and Berezovsky. 

While its strength and influence has certainly been restored, its foreign investments remain low even in the Ukraine where Moscow has been accused of territorial expansion with the so-called “annexation” of Crimea, where the mostly Russian-speaking eastern Ukrainian population actually voted to join its neighbor in a referendum. 

Russia may no longer be an empire (or communist), but yet it remains in the crosshairs of Western imperialism, whose political leaders and subservient corporate media are still conducting the “mad slander” that Pushkin opined.

 

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2020/09/25/the-false-flag-poisoning-of-alexei-navalny/

 

 

Meanwhile:

 

Russian opposition figure Alexei Navalny has had his bank accounts frozen and flat seized after a court order, his spokeswoman says.

A day earlier he was discharged from a hospital where he was being treated for Novichok nerve agent poisoning."They seized the assets and the apartment of a person who was in a coma," Kira Yarmysh said.His team accuses President Vladimir Putin of ordering the poisoning, something the Kremlin strongly denies.The leading opposition figure and vocal critic of Mr Putin collapsed on a flight in Siberia on 20 August, and was later transferred to the Charité hospital in the German capital Berlin for treatment.Germany's government said laboratories in France and Sweden had reconfirmed German tests showing that the poison used on Mr Navalny was a Novichok agent, and numerous governments have demanded an explanation. The Kremlin however has said there is no proof of that.After Mr Navalny was discharged on Wednesday, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said he was "free" to return to Moscow "at any moment", and wished him "a speedy recovery".Why have his assets been seized?Ms Yarmysh said officials had seized the opposition activist's assets on 27 August, including his three-bedroom apartment in the south-east of the Russian capital, Moscow. "It means the flat cannot be sold, donated or mortgaged," Ms Yarmysh said in a video posted on Twitter.The move comes after a lawsuit was filed by the Moscow Schoolchild catering company, owned by wealthy Russian businessman Yevgeny Prigozhin, nicknamed "Putin's chef".Mr Navalny, his Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) and an associate made a video questioning the quality of their products after a food poisoning outbreak in Moscow's schools in 2018.But in October 2019 a court ordered them to delete the video and pay 88 million rubles ($1.1m; £900,000) in damages for libel, saying they had caused the company moral damage.On Wednesday, Mr Prigozhin released a statement saying that if Mr Navalny "goes to meet his maker, then I personally do not intend to pursue him in this world".

Read more:

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-54284945

 

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Note that coackroach bait gives a similar brain imprint than Novichok. Had Navalny really taken Novichok, he would have died within minutes... It is quite cunning that the Skripals, who alledgedly were poisoned with Novichok as well, DID NOT SCREAM — like Navalny did — and just fell unconscious on a public bench a few hours after having touched the dreaded poisoned door knob and having a meal at a reputable restaurant...

the news, from one eye or the other...

The news from the BBC:

 

BBC1

 

 

What the BBC should have said:

 

BBC2

 

Here we can gauge the slant of the news. Navalny has NO PROOF the Kremlin tried to poison him — and the choice of importance in headlining the event shows a "preference of value"... Read from top.

 

As far as we could speculate, the affair could have been set up for Navalny to gain notoriety for his party in the elections just after his poisoning. Or the CIA or other agencies did the deed to embarrass Putin. These unsubstantiated hypothesis have as much value as Navalny accusing the Kremlin: zero.


asserting assertion that the assertion is asserted...

It's six o'clock in the morning on Wednesday when Alexei Navalny shows up at the Berlin editorial office of DER SPIEGEL for an interview. The office is located a few hundred meters from Charité University Hospital, where Navalny spent a month receiving treatment, hovering between life and death.


Navalny, who was poisoned with the nerve agent Novichok, was only released from the hospital last week.


Four agents from the State Office of Criminal Investigation (LKA) accompanied him during his visit. Navalny, who wasn't able to walk not long ago, took the stairs to the office rather than the elevator.


Alexei Navalny, 44, is Russia's most prominent opposition politician. Following the attempt on his life on August 20 in the Siberian city of Tomsk, however, he is now squarely in the international spotlight. German Chancellor Angela Merkel intervened for him to be allowed to leave Russia for treatment in Germany. Because he was poisoned with a substance that can essentially only come from state-run laboratories in Russia, the question of Russian President Vladimir Putin's personal responsibility is one that many around the world are asking. It's not the first time that a Russian opposition politician was to be killed, but it is the first time that the circumstances seem to so clearly point at the Kremlin.

 

 

Read more:

https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/alexei-navalny-on-his-poisoning-i-assert-that-putin-was-behind-the-crime-a-ae5923d5-20f3-4117-80bd-39a99b5b86f4

 

 

Der Spiegel has a fake toy bone in its jaws and it's going to squish it and squeesh it and squee-shit and sq'uisheet.... and... But proofs? None...

 

And in terms of "most prominent opposition leader in Russia, the old Commies have far more clout than Mr 2 per cent. Navalny is loved by the West, because he shouts more along the line of what we want to hear... Had Mr Navalny been hit with Novichok, he would be dead, deaded, kaput, finished, buried, cremated, creamed up,  and all the fantasies about "the 2 hours that saved his life" or such are pure bullshit. Novichok kills in minutes and leaves no trace — except a signature that is equivalent to most of the nerve agents, including VX (check?) including cockroach bait...

 

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no "other explanation"...

Germany, France push for Russia sanctions over Navalny poisoning

There is no "plausible" explanation for Navalny's poisoning besides Russian involvement, the two countries said. They will push for EU sanctions targeting individuals and "an institution."

 

Blah blah blah blah... Read from top

sanctions had long been in the works...

Previously, France and Germany promised they would send suggestions for targeted sanctions against Russia relating to the Navalny case to their European Union partners in the near future should Moscow not "explain" why and how the political activist had been poisoned.

The incident with Alexei Navalny's alleged poisoning was just a pre-text for imposing sanctions against Russia that had long been in the works, Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova stated. She added that Moscow will respond to the introduction of sanctions accordingly.

 

Read more:

https://sputniknews.com/russia/202010081080711176-moscow-says-navalny-case-used-as-pretext-for-new-round-of-russia-sanctions-vows-reciprocal-response/

 

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of novichok and navalny...

MOSCOW, October 10. /TASS/. Toxic substances from the Novichok group were developed in no less than 20 Western countries and they currently have 140 substance options, Russia’s Foreign Ministry said in a commentary on Saturday.

"As for the chemical warfare agent called Novichok in the West, its structure and mass-spectrum were presented for the first time in 1998 in the spectral database of the American Standards Institute," the commentary says.

"Subsequently, a whole family of toxic chemicals uncovered by the Convention [the Chemical Weapons Convention] emerged on the basis of the afore-mentioned compound. Along with Americans, no less than 20 Western countries worked with them. Therefore, Novichok is a purely Western brand. It was synthesized and is available in those countries in 140 options. We do not have it," Russia’s Foreign Ministry said.

German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas’ pronouncement on Moscow’s ‘absurd reproaches’ addressed to Germany and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) around the situation with blogger Alexey Navalny causes indignation and does not stand up to scrutiny, Russia’s Foreign Ministry also said.

"Such pronouncements are outrageous and do not stand up to scrutiny. All that we want is to get legal, technical and organizational assistance both in the bilateral Russian-German format and at the OPCW venue in the interests of carrying out a comprehensive, unbiased and impartial probe into all the circumstances of what happened," Russia’s Foreign Ministry noted.

"We want very much to know who is behind the anti-Russian provocation orchestrated from the very beginning. In response, we get aggressive rhetoric and outright manipulation of the facts," it said.

The four unanswered requests for legal assistance sent by the Russian Prosecutor General’s Office relate not only to the Navalny ‘personal data’ as was claimed by Maas, the ministry said.

"It is no less important to clarify quite specific details of this case. These are the circumstances of the emergence and the exportation of a bottle from Russia, on which the traces of a chemical warfare agent were allegedly found, the possibility of questioning female citizen Pevchikh who accompanied Navalny and lives in Great Britain, and other very important applied aspects, including explanations for a message that the Omsk airport received from Germany about a bomb threat at the time when the airliner landed there with Navalny on its board," Russia’s Foreign Ministry said.

"We insist that Germany should honor its commitments under the European Convention on Mutual Assistance in Criminal Matters and the protocols to it. The German side must give explanations, despite its stubborn reluctance to do so," the statement says.

Read more:

https://tass.com/politics/1210803

 

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------------------------------

 

Below is a letter by a reader of our articles. His comments are his own and do not reflect those of the site, the site owners or hosting agencies — yet they seem to go along the same lines as published from the toon onwards, with a bit more development of ideas:

 

Greetings! My name is Sven Haas, and I’m an expert in Eastern Europe.


Alexey Navalny poisoning and the following media speculation expectedly caught my attention. NavalnyGATE is still acquiring new details and inconsistencies. To exclude facts manipulation and to deal with the situation, I reconstructed the chronology and made a timeline based on information from many sources. I considered all versions in the context of who benefited from it.

If I am correct, you have already covered this case that sparked interest and discussion among your audience. 
I would be immensely grateful if you pay attention to my material, look it through, and then consider for the publication. 


NavalnyGate: Key Facts, Dates, Versions 

The high-profile case of Alexey Navalny’s poisoning, apparently, will not subside soon. This incident faced a stormy international reaction and served as an excellent opportunity to punish Russia. In order to exclude any possible manipulations with facts, we recreated the timeline, which helped to identify discrepancies and designate possible versions of what had happened.

This timeline allows us to replicate the experience and helped to analyse every side of the story. At the same time, the identification of the available facts, as well as separation of false statements pointed at numerous inconsistencies. All this made it possible to put several main versions of Navalny's poisoning in the context of the motives of the attackers. First, we reviewed the official version of the German’s investigation team.


Reconstructed timeline

Version 1. Navalny was poisoned by Russian authorities To investigate this version in a clinical fashion, it is necessary to outline Navalny’s place in Russia’s political landscape. Alexey Navalny became popular after his investigation videos about illegal enrichment of Russian officials, as well as fraudulent activity in Russia’s state structures. At first glance, the version that the poisoning of Navalny could have been planned by Kremlin officials seemed very convincing. But could the representatives of the Russian authorities actually organize it?

First, there are strong doubts about the fact that the “victims” of Navalny's investigation would decide to liquidate the offender. They could easily pay off with removal from power and an inquiry into charges of corruption.

Secondly, the poisoning of Navalny is not beneficial to Russia in economic terms. Political strategists and leading analysts in the Russian the government are quite capable of calculating that such an incident would cause a wide public outcry not only in Russia but also far beyond its borders. It is easy to calculate the possible consequences: massive unauthorized rallies in the country, new sanctions and the suspension of Nord Stream 2. All this would certainly hit the wallets of Russian authorities.

Third, if the Kremlin really had poisoned Navalny, no one would have ever been allowed the opposition leader to be evacuated to Germany.

Moreover, the political life of Alexey in Russia did not present significant prospects. The opposition leader did not represent serious competition to pro-government structures. The tremendous success of Navalny's entire political career was the election of the mayor of Moscow in 2013 when Alexey almost made it to the second round.

The latest poll by the Russian Levada Center records only 2% of confidence to him. Probably, his ratings were seriously affected by the Kirovles case, in which Navalny was accused.

From a scientific point of view, such "assassination" method looks even more confusing. According to German medical experts, a Novichok-class chemical warfare agent was used in the incident. The exact formula of the chemical has not been disclosed. Many politicians and experts were sure that only Russians knew the formula for making this dangerous substance.

However, this is not entirely true.

Novichok became widely known in 2008 from the work of the Russian scientist Vil Mirzayanov. From his book, the public became aware of the development of four stable substances of the Novichok group: A-230, A-232, A-234, and A-242. However, back in 1998, long before Mirzayanov's revelations, the chemical formula and mass spectrum of the substance A-234 were discovered in the NIST98 Spectral Library of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), USA. The same formula is available in the database of the British Royal Society of Chemistry. As we see, the "top-secret" Russian weapon is not only in the hands of the Russians.
Also, at the beginning of 2019, a group of theoretical chemists from Mauritius and South Africa became interested in the substance. They used numerical simulations to study the reactivity and other chemical properties of A-234. Ultimately, the experts confirmed that not only Russians are capable of synthesizing the substance. Moreover, the N-1 scientific journal proves that any country with a developed chemical industry is capable of synthesizing substances like Novichok.

On December 23, 2019, liquid substances A-230, A-232, and A-234 were prohibited by OPCW and added to Schedule 1 of the Annex on Chemicals to the Chemical Weapons Convention. However, the situation with solid type A-242 is the most interesting. 

It could become a great chance to accuse Russia of developing and testing a new type of chemical agent in order to evasion the OPCW ban, but Russians have added it to Schedule 1on July 7, 2020.

Version 2. Navalny was poisoned by his supporters and sponsors

Some media outlets admit that Alexey Navalny could have been excluded from the opposition because he has already been swept into the political wastebasket. Logical questions arise: “who wanted him to be excluded?”
and “why was it necessary to kill him?”

First, we should remember the project called the Smart Vote, promoted by Alexey Navalny so hard. Smart Vote was developed by Russian political opposition to break the monopoly of power of the “United Russia”
(Yedinaya Rossiya), the largest political party in Russian Federation.

Unfortunately, the project was unable to change the situation with the elections. Moreover, an analysis of the voting results questioned Navalny's leadership, as many expected more success. It seemed that Navalny deliberately misled his audience and his sponsors.

Secondly, the all-Russian constitutional amendments voting events were also indicative. Navalny's view on the referendum differed from the position of numerous oligarchs, including Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who has urged the Russian population to rally and riot. They invested considerable sums in the promotion of protests, while Navalny stole a significant number of their likely supporters. This could provoke Khodorkovsky into decisive actions against his competitor.

However, not only Khodorkovsky could have initiated the assassination attempt. Vladimir Ashurkov, who promoted Alexey Navalny at the beginning of his career, might have more serious motives. As we know, Ashurkov’s help to Navalny provoked the loss of his post as a top manager in Alfa Group, as well as conflict with the intelligence services and the granting of political asylum by Great Britain.


Navalny’s sponsor Vladimir Ashurkov

After Navalny drew too much attention of influential businessmen and officials to the Anti-corruption foundation (FBK), which eventually was recognized as a foreign agent, the former banker became very worried about his brainchild. It became impossible to legally use the Smart Vote technology and influence the electoral processes. The funding was also limited.

Moreover, the decision to liquidate the FBK was made without the businessman's approval. Perhaps, when the juridical entity was closed, Navalny could have withdrawn the remaining funds from the accounts and appropriated it for himself. This could anger Ashurkov considering his financial struggles: a number of companies owned by the businessman have recently suffered losses totalling 3 million pounds.

The businessman clearly did not like the numerous dubious financial frauds that Navalny carried out. Most likely, serious debts, as well as the aggressive information campaign of Prigozhin's units against the FBK and its subsequent liquidation led to conflict. Given this fact, it cannot be ruled out that the former Alfa Group top manager was involved in the poisoning attempt.

In addition, Ashurkov, who was striving to return the money spent at any cost could also derive additional benefit from the poisoning, raising the ratings of the opposition in Russia. Blaming the Kremlin for the failed assassination attempt has boosted Navalny's popularity. Leonid Volkov, the head of the FBK regional headquarters’ network said that “the opposition's duty is to make the most of the situation with the poisoning in order to benefit from the Smart Vote in the upcoming elections.”

Version 3. Navalny was poisoned by his associate MariaPevchikh



Maria Pevchikh among Navalny’s supporters

The possibility of Navalny’s poisoning by his mysterious associate Maria Pevchikh looks quite plausible. The information on the woman is contradictory and scare, as Maria prefers to leave no traces on the Internet and most likely uses social media under an assumed name. She also has close ties with Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Bill Browder, and Vladimir Ashurkov.

Since 2011, Maria has been unofficially working for the Anti-corruption foundation and performs various functions for collecting information on the property of the Russian oligarchs and officials abroad for Alexey Navalny.

Usually, such information is classified and cannot be found in the public domain that suggests the cooperation between the British special services and Navalny's pretty assistant. We have failed to detect a joint photo of Pevchikh and Navalny as well as her links with Anti-corruption foundation before the events in Tomsk. 
Exactly her links with Great Britain closed private life in the digital age, and many other inconsistencies, including the sudden idea of stealing a bottle of water from Navalny’s room number, makes us to examine the version of her involvement in poisoning in detail. 

First, there is something strange about her travel across Russia. From Tomsk to Omsk one could quickly fly by airplane with a landing in Novosibirsk. Instead, she got to Novosibirsk by car. In an interview with BBC Maria said about the lack of direct route between these two Siberian cities that is actually not true. 

Secondly, the seizure of the bottle from Xander hotel in Tomsk by Navalny’s team and Maria Pevchikh can be categorised as a crime according to Russian low. They violated the rules for collecting and transporting material evidence. In addition, while being in the room number, the Navalny’s supporters focused precisely on the bottle, despite many other things and clothes. From outside, it looks as if someone knew in advance what would become the key evidence in this sticky case.

Third, it remains a mystery how people who contacted Alexey Navalny didn’t expose to the nerve agent if it was actually used. This fact is clearly doesn’t correspond with unprecedented measures taken by the UK after the Skripal poisoning.



Alexey Navalny surrounded by people without masks and gloves before departure in Tomsk


British specialists in Salisbury

Currently, we can’t directly say that Maria Pevchikh is a British intelligence officer. Perhaps, she is just an indifferent employee of Anti-corruption foundation, and the special services simply exploited her.

But if we assume that Maria is somehow linked with the poisoning, three possible versions of Novichok appearance in Navalny’s medical tests can emerge. 

For instance, several tabloids rushed to report that father of Maria, who is co-founder of several medical companies, provided her with the poisonous substance. Then it turned out that he is just a marketer who doesn’t have access to Novichok and other substances. 

The second version looks much more transparent. The substance could have been handed over to Pevchikh by the British specialists. They told her in advance how to use it and get rid of the evidence. Moreover, the experts could calculate the dose of a substance what would only cause coma and choose the location of poisoning. At the same time, Navalny was under the close watch of the Russian FSB, and only Pevchikh could get closer to the opposition leader and poison him. 

We also should not exclude the third variant, where Novichok doesn’t exist at all, and Navalny faked poisoning himself. Simultaneously Pevchikh as Navalny’s confident performs this show with the bottle of water. Then the British special services or CIA put pressure on the OPCW, Germany, and international laboratories to detect the prohibited substance in Navalny’s blood.

In the second and third cases, Great Britain, probably alongside with CIA, carried out a flawless operation and concurrently framed Germany, which is now forced to suspend the Nord Stream 2 pipeline. In this case, Novichok was chosen as it is strongly associated with Salisbury incident. 

The likelihood of the third option is indirectly evidenced by a joint photo of Navalny and his family published on Instagram after coming out of a coma. The monitor with medical indicators in the background attracted our attention. A number of experts claim that he was deliberately blurred to cover up the medical indicators, which most likely have long been normal.



Navalny’s photo after coming out of coma The Russian side was stumped due to the actions of Navalny’s supporter, who had concealed the investigation results. At the same time, the German authorities directly refused to convey information to Russian specialists and offered to act through OPCW. For his part, Navalny also refused to cooperate with Russia, which gives Europe a monopoly on examining his medical tests. 

Today the international community has a clear position concerning the guilt of the Russian leadership in this case, as Alexey Navalny has long been the greatest enemy of Vladimir Putin.

All of this demonstrates the commitment of German’s policy towards Navalny and Russia. Only two countries could stand behind the poisoning that continues to promote its political and business interests at the expense of others. Moreover, German political circles were clearly involved in provocative scheme on influencing Russia to isolate it from the world community.

Sven Haas

 

------------------------

 

YD has not been able to verify the bona fide of Sven, but what he says in his letter makes sense in questioning the West's narrative. Meanwhile, Gus still thinks that the Navalny "poisoning" was a case created by Western "intelligence" agencies to damage the Kremlin — and try to kill off the NordSea 2 project which the US see as a major diplomatic threat to their monopoly on oil and gas finances.

 

Interestingly, from another site which supply various links we have this item:

 

 

Russia Reform Monitor No. 2417October 7, 2020 Matt MaldonadoIlan I. Berman, Amanda HardyNavalny assets seized by authorities;
Navalny poisoned himself, Putin tells Macron;
Yalta mayor fires deputy over Belarus support;
Russia, China conspire at UN over Libya;
Russian hackers to be sentenced in U.S.
READ MORE >

 

 

See also: https://www.rt.com/news/503158-western-nations-possess-novichok-russia/

 

Note: When I lived in Africa, there was roughly 200 poisons that could kill, incapacitate or turn anyone into a "zombie" — all poisons that were "untraceable"at the time. Present techniques of chemical analysis could be able to identify these but as far as I know some cockroach baits are "nerve agents" that leave a similar trace as Novichok... 

 

 

We shall see...

 

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not deadly at all...

WESTERN SPIES PRIVATELY BLAME RUSSIA’S FSB FOR ALEXEI NAVALNY POISONING

Apparently the Western intelligence agencies have all “privately” decided that Russia was responsible for the “attempted poisoning” of Alexei Navalny. This will surprise literally nobody, what else were they ever going to say?

Of course, the reason they’ve decided this “privately”, is that they have absolutely no evidence it’s true. But having no evidence has never stopped The Guardian reporting anything, especially when it comes to Russia.

It’s been around 60 days since Alexei Navalny was allegedly poisoned with “novichok”, and in that time The Guardian has published over 40 articles and videos on the subject. All of them, obviously, toeing the party line that Putin was responsible. None asking any of the obvious questions, and none less accurate or more obviously propaganda than this piece.

You can probably already guess who it was written by.

There’s no real need to get into the details except to point out how far the novichok narrative has fallen. Remember 2018, when novichok was one of the deadliest nerve agents ever created? The New York Times called it “the nerve agent too deadly to use”.

Well now, three failed assassinations later, it turns out novichok:

 

can cause a heart attack or asphyxiation if administered in a high enough dose.”

 

Oh, sorry not “failed assassinations” because – unlike the Skripals – the Russians didn’t want to kill Navalny:

 

the operation was designed not to kill Navalny but to send him an unambiguous warning and to force him into exile […] If [the FSB] had wanted to kill Navalny, it could have done so.

 

So we have a story about “deadly nerve agent” (that never kills anyone), being used in an assassination (that wasn’t an assassination) written by a journalist (who doesn’t do journalism) in a “newspaper” (which is anything but new). Very neat.

 

 

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2020/10/19/this-week-in-the-guardian-15/

 

 

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the fiction so far...


A deadly cocktail: Spies, cell phone records and the poisoned Negroni behind Bellingcat’s Navalny ‘expose’


It might look like any dilapidated Soviet-era apartment block on the outskirts of Moscow but, according to a CNN camera crew, behind its walls lives a state security agent who allegedly poisoned opposition figure Alexey Navalny.

The slightly bewildered-looking man who closed the door in their face is at the center of a new investigation published on Monday by US government-funded digital investigations outfit Bellingcat in collaboration with CNN, Germany’s Der Spiegel, and Russia’s the Insider. They claim that his footprints lead all the way from a bar in the Siberian city of Tomsk to the desk of Russian President Vladimir Putin. In a slew of allegations, it is said that Navalny was tailed for years by a top-secret team of agents from Russia’s domestic security agency, the FSB, and it was they who attacked him with a military-grade nerve agent. 

Furthermore, after he was taken ill on a flight to Moscow the next day, the same team supposedly gave the comatose activist a second dose of lethal Novichok as he was laid up in the hospital. Somehow, according to a separate splash in the UK’s Sunday Times, Navalny had not one but two brushes with what researchers say is the deadliest substance ever made, but has lived to tell the tale.

“Bulls**t.” That’s the fairly blunt verdict Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov delivered concerning the earlier expose, when asked on Monday. “The Sunday Times is to be read on a Sunday in a dressing gown,” he added mockingly; “there’s false information, and then there’s this.” Navalny himself was getting dressed, according to the report in the Sunday Times, which alleged that the poison was “probably”placed on the underpants he put on in the hotel.

Bellingcat’s new allegations seem to contradict the Times’ sensational tale. According to them, Navalny ordered a Bloody Mary in his hotel the night before his flight. But, when the barman said he didn’t have the necessary ingredients, the activist settled for a Negroni. However, it is now implied that besides the gin and vermouth, there was a splash of something much more bitter. “The cocktail tasted like the most disgusting thing I’ve had in my life,” he told the investigators, claiming he only took one sip.

The confession that the Moscow protest leader might have partaken in a ‘Novichoktail’ seems at odds with claims from his press secretary shortly after the incident, when she insisted “he drank nothing” the night before. His team has long claimed that the deadly poison had been slipped into his morning tea at the airport the next morning. The story was then later changed, and a water bottle found in his hotel room was blamed after it was taken to Berlin for analysis. 

If the sip of Negroni was the source of Navalny’s ordeal, it’s also hard to understand how it took somewhere between 10 and 14 hours to work, after a full night’s sleep, before suddenly leading to violent convulsions on a plane the next day, and collapsing into a coma.


The crux of Bellingcat’s investigation, which puts Putin himself at the top of the chain of command, is that records taken from one of Russia’s cell phone networks pinpointed the alleged FSB agents within a short drive of Navalny in Tomsk. Apparently, they had tailed him before on dozens of trips around the country, but they chose this one to make an attempt on his life.

How the online activists, many of whom say they are volunteers, got hold of that data in the first place is now the subject of much speculation. In an interview with liberal Russian broadcaster Echo of Moscow on Monday, high-profile liberal journalist Oleg Kashin said that while this kind of personal information, when it comes to normal folk, might be accessible to those who know how to look for it, getting the GPS location of FSB agents inside Russia is hardly something that amateur investigators would succeed in doing. He added that even black marketeers selling this kind of information online would draw the line at exposing security officials.

Former Russian member of parliament Sergey Markov previously claimed that “Bellingcat looks very much like the information warfare department of MI6 to me.” He added that he believes “very professional people are working on their falsifications.” The group previously came under fire for moving away from its original stated intention of using only open-source material, admitting to relying on so-called “confidential human sources” in their investigation into the alleged poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal. 

Bellingcat’s latest supposed sting will do little to dispel suggestions that its team is working closely with intelligence agencies. According to Michael Schwirtz from the New York Times, “a senior German security official says the report aligns with what CIA and MI6 quietly provided the German government months ago.”


If Bellingcat arrived at the same conclusions independently, they are clearly giving global spy agencies a run for their money. What is more, they’re good value as well – while the outfit is coy about its funding, some of which is known to come from the US government, it is unlikely to have the access and assets of MI6, which takes a large cut of the $3.5 billion of taxpayer’s cash committed to Britain’s intelligence budget each year. 

Given how closely Bellingcat’s investigations align with Britain’s geopolitical objectives, and appear to be overwhelmingly targeted at Russia, the idea that the outfit is colluding with Western spooks feels all the more plausible.

Wherever they come from, the revelations have stirred Western media into a frenzy. It’s also worth noting that if similar information was coming directly from spy agencies, without the kind of hipster filter Bellingcat provides, it would be far more difficult for media outfits to take them at face value. Naturally, it would also be a harder sell for the general public given the tarnished reputation of British and American spooks over the past two decades since they provided false intelligence to drag their countries into the illegal Iraq War.

When Clarissa Ward and CNN’s news team pitched up to the home of the man Bellingcat claims was behind the events in Tomsk, they got the footage they were after – a door closing on reporters. But, as analysts begin to mark the investigators’ homework, the question of where they are getting their facts from remains wide open.

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/russia/509757-navalny-poisoning-bellingcat-expose/

 

 

 

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they would have finished it...

Russian President Vladimir Putin held his annual marathon year-end press conference Thursday, fielding questions for just over four and a half hours. 

In one of the livelier exchanges, he disputed reports of his government’s culpability in the attempted poisoning murder of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, sarcastically claiming that if his covert agents had been dispatched to kill Navalny, “they would have finished it.”

 

Putin was responding to a question about an investigative report CNN published Tuesday that concluded a unit of the Russian FSB security service, the successor to the infamous KGB, had been spying on Navalny and his staffers for some time before the attempt on his life in August. The investigative report identified these FSB agents and noted one of them is a specialist in “toxins and nerve agents.”


The German doctors who treated Navalny after he was airlifted to Berlin confirmed he was poisoned with Novichok, a Russian nerve agent also used in the attempted assassination of former spy Sergei Skripal in 2018.


Putin avoided using Navalny’s name, instead referring to him as “the patient in the Berlin clinic.” After claiming Russian agents would have done a better job of killing Navalny, and making much of the fact that he allowed Navalny to be taken to Germany for treatment, he bizarrely insisted the United States was the party that attempted to poison Skripal.


CNN noted that in the course of mocking its report, Putin “essentially confirmed that FSB agents did indeed trail Navalny.”


Putin snapped at a BBC journalist that Russia is “more white and fluffy than you,” meaning the Russian government is morally superior to those of the United Kingdom and United States. He then rattled off a list of the West’s purported “crimes,” including the expansion of NATO in defiance of promises made in the last days of the Soviet Union.


In response to another question, Putin continued his insistence that Russia did not meddle in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.


“Russian hackers did not help the current president of the United States to be elected and did not interfere in the internal affairs of this great power. This is all speculation, this is all a reason to spoil relations between Russia and the United States. This is a reason not to recognize the legitimacy of the current president of the United States of America for domestic political American reasons,” he said.

 

Read more:

https://www.breitbart.com/national-security/2020/12/17/putin-if-i-wanted-navalny-dead-my-assassins-would-have-finished-it/

 

 

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poison in the underpants: the novel...

One of the operatives allegedly involved in the attempt to kill Alexei Navalny has confessed to his role in the plot, and has revealed that the Russian opposition leader was apparently poisoned via his underwear.

Navalny phoned two members of the team from Russia’s FSB spy agency, which allegedly tried to murder him. One recognised him immediately and hung up. The second operative, Konstantin Kudryavtsev, was seemingly duped into thinking he was talking to an aide working for a top FSB general.

The call was made hours before the investigative website Bellingcat published details last week of the eight FSB officers who allegedly poisoned Navalny.

Navalny survived the attempt to kill him in August and is recuperating in Germany.

Posing as “Maxim Ustinov”, a fictional aide, Navalny asked Kudryavtsev for details of the operation and demanded to know what had gone wrong.

Unaware that he was being spoofed, Kudryavtsev apparently confirmed the FSB was behind the poisoning. He said his colleagues had applied novichok to the “inner seams” of the opposition leader’s boxer shorts, when Navalny was staying in the Siberian city of Tomsk.

 

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/21/navalny-russian-agent-novichok-death-plot

 

 

If you believe this "news", you're at the back of the class polishing the bench with your own nappies — and your scores for the year have been a consistent F minus. Your teacher gave you some wood to chop in the yard instead of homework and you can't engrave your own name in the desk with a blade knife, without making a mistake...

But I know you believe anything, including Old Gus... Yep, No less than eight, POSSIBLY UGLY, operatives to poison Navalny...

 

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we expect better from peter hartcher...

The picture changed when Navalny’s supporters wrested him from the Omsk hospital and flew him to Germany. The Germans brought their Defence Ministry scientists into the case. They quickly diagnosed Novichok poisoning. The same method used to poison the Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Britain in 2018.

But even when the Germans made their pronouncement, Putin kept up the façade of respectability. He didn’t deny reports that agents of his Federal Security Bureau, or FSB, successor agency to the KGB, had been following Navalny for three years. But the FSB wasn’t responsible for the poisoning, he said. “If they wanted to, they would have finished the job.”

 

Read more:

https://www.smh.com.au/national/global-threat-from-three-strongmen-20210118-p56uvr.html

 

--------------------

At least Peter Hartcher says "The 49-minute call was witnessed by journalists at Navalny’s end in Germany and recorded. It will go down as one of the great moments in espionage, more Johnny English than John Le Carré."

 

Yep, Gus, having studied double agents and spies since the late 1960s, AND ALSO BEING AWARE OF SPOOFS by "Russian" callers on celebs and politicians, we can be sure that this phone call has ZERO "great moment in espionage" value. It's BULLSHITTTTT!!!!!!

 

Did I say BULLSHIT? Not even in the class of the RAINBOW WARRIOR which was a REAL fiasco... Oh, and why is Navalny now in prison for a month? According to some other reliable (?) sources, Navalny (Mr 2 per cent in Russia but touted as Mr 60 per cent by the West) had been warned by the Russian authorities that they would put him in prison charged with something like tax evasion or whatever disorder, should he come back or not pay up.

-------------

 

And one more thing. When Hartcher says: "The advance of authoritarianism in these three great powers is part of a broader trend. We are entering the 15th year of democratic recession in the world, where the number of countries operating under a democratic system continues to shrink. There is no nice way to say it. The survival of human liberty is at stake." He should ask the question: "WHO IS REDUCING HUMAN FREEDOM IN THE USA AT THE MOMENT?" If he answers Trump, he is out of his tree. If he answers TWITTER, FACEBOOK AND GOOGLE, he is on the money...

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inside the biden sewer...

 

Alexei Navalny & Russia Baiting: Biden Brings Back Business as Usual

Only 48 hours in power, and already the team behind The Maidan is looking to start a colour revolution in Moscow.

 

Kit Knightly


Joe Biden enters the White House with an entourage of faces very familiar to OffGuardian, and many of those readers who have been with us since the beginning.

Glassy-eyed Jen Psaki is once again taking the White House press briefings. Victoria “Fuck the EU” Nuland is going to be secretary of state, and Samantha Power is hoisted back onto a platform from which she can berate the rest of the world for not following America’s “moral example” by bombing Syria back to the stone age.

It was the machinations of these people – along with Biden as VP, John Kerry as Secretary of State and of course Barack Obama leading the charge – that lead to the coup in Ukraine, the war in Donbass and – indirectly – the creation of this website. For it was our comments on the Guardian telling this truth that got everyone here banned, multiple times.

So, for us, pointing out cold-war style propaganda is like slipping back into a comfy pair of shoes.

A good thing too, because with this coterie of neocon-style warmongers comes another familiar friend: the propaganda war on Putin’s Russia. Throughout the media and on every front, all within hours of Biden’s inauguration.

Now, anti-Russia nonsense didn’t go away while Trump was President – if anything it became deranged to the point of literal insanity in many quarters – but it definitely quietened down in the last 12 months, with the outbreak of the “pandemic”.

No more! Now we’re back to good old-fashioned cold-war craziness. The media tell us that Russia was a “spectre that loomed over Trump’s presidency”, that one of the Capitol Hill rioters intended to “sell Nancy Pelosi’s laptop to Russia” and other such brazen hysteria.

Of course underneath the standard pot-stirring propaganda to keep the “new cold war” on the boil, there is the Navalny narrative. An incredibly contrived piece of political theatre that may even evolve into a full-on attempt at regime change in Moscow.

For starters, three days before Biden’s inauguration, Alexei Navalny (having supposedly only just survived the poison the FSB placed “in his underpants”), returned to Russia. Where he was promptly arrested for violating the terms of his bail

He knew he would be arrested if he returned to Russia, so his doing so was pure theatre. That fact is only underlined by the media’s reaction to his 30 day jail sentence. 

Yes, that’s thirty DAYS, not years. He’ll be out before spring. Even if he’s convicted of the numerous charges of embezzlement and fraud, he faces only 3 years in prison.

Nevertheless, already the familiar Russia-baiters in the media are comparing him to Nelson Mandela.

On the same day as Biden’s inauguration, the European Parliament announced that Russia should be punished for arresting Navalny, by having the Nordstream 2 pipeline project closed down. (Closing this pipeline down would open up the European market to buy US gas, instead of Russia. This is a complete coincidence).

And then, the day after Biden’s inauguration, the European Court of Human Rights announced they had found Russia guilty of war crimes during the 5-day war in South Ossetia in 2008. The report was subject to a gleeful (and terrible) write-up by (who else?) Luke Harding. (Why they waited 13 years to make this announcement remains a mystery)

It doesn’t stop there, already Western pundits and Russian “celebrities” are trying to encourage street protests in support of Alexei Navalny. An anonymous Guardian editorial states Navalny’s “bravery needs backing”, whatever that means.

All of this could mean Biden is “forced” to “change his mind” and pull out of the re-signing of the anti-nuclear weapons treaty. Ooops. 

But are there bigger aims behind this as well? Do they hope they can create another Maidan…but this time in Moscow? That would be insane, but you can’t rule it out.

One thing is for sure, though; they work fast. Less than two days in office, and we’ve already got a new colour revolution kicking off. Speedy work.

 

Read more:

https://off-guardian.org/2021/01/22/russia-baiting-biden-brings-back-business-as-usual/

 

 

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navalny is a small time crook...

Running damage control on the ‘prisoner of conscience’ row, Amnesty officials assured a prankster impersonating Alexey Navalny’s ally that they fully supported the jailed blogger and didn’t actually care about media freedom.

During a zoom call, Amnesty International’s Secretary General Julie Verhaar, Eastern Europe and Central Asia director Marie Struthers and her deputy Denis Krivosheev bent over backwards to assure ‘Leonid Volkov’ that the organization was still backing Navalny, even though it revoked his “prisoner of conscience”status over previous remarks that qualified as hate speech.

Treating the row as a public relations problem, Amnesty International officials told ‘Volkov’ they couldn’t go back on the decision because that would make them look bad, but assured him they would launch a massive social media campaign in support of Navalny and not lift a finger to help Russian journalists persecuted in Latvia

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/russia/516600-amnesty-navalny-zoom-prank/

 

 

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a conspiracy set up by the CIA...

 The latest OPCW report containing data on its response to the ‘poisoning’ of Russian opposition figure Alexey Navalny has glaring inconsistencies, Moscow says, adding that the chemical weapons watchdog has failed to explain them.

Russia will seek clarification from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) on its findings, the country’s envoy to the chemical weapons watchdog Aleksandr Shulgin has announced. The document, presented at the 97th session of the organization’s executive council earlier this week, contains information on the body’s reaction to Navalny’s poisoning back in August 2020.

In it, the OPCW states that its secretariat “deployed a team to perform a technical assistance visit”related to the suspected poisoning of a “Russian citizen” at Germany’s request on August 20. The problem is that on that day, Navalny was only flying from the Russian Siberian city of Tomsk to Moscow. It was on that flight that he first felt ill and was then rushed to a hospital in another Siberian city, Omsk, following the plane’s emergency landing.

Russia demanded that the OPCW explain “how this is even possible” and why the organization had previously told the participating states that its team was only sent to Germany in early September, Shulgin said.

So, what do we have here? When Navalny first felt unwell while still onboard a flight from Tomsk to Moscow, the OPCW experts were already waiting for him in Berlin?

According to the Russian envoy to the OPCW, the technical secretariat of the chemical weapons watchdog has so far failed to provide any answer to these questions. According to Shulgin, Russia has “lots of questions” for the OPCW and will seek “clear answers” to every last one.

The revelations also elicited a reaction from the Russian Foreign Ministry’s spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova. She said the glaring inconsistencies in the OPCW report only show that some Western nations, together with Navalny himself, are “going down” with their whole “chemical weapons poisoning story.”

Instead of answering Russia’s questions, the OPCW executive committee session saw another “drama”about Navalny’s “supposed poisoning with a chemical weapon agent,” Shulgin said. “Routine anti-Russian theses have become a ‘must’ for the NATO nations at any OPCW event,” he added.

 

Read more:

https://www.rt.com/russia/528896-russia-opcw-report-navalny-poisoning/

 

The cat is out of the bag....

 

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assangexassangex